Forgery Beyond Deceit Fabrication, Value, and the Desire for Ancient Rome

What do forgeries do? Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value, and the Desire for Ancient Rome explores that question with a focus on forgery in ancient Rome and of ancient Rome. Its chapters reach from antiquity to the twentieth century and cover literature and art, the two areas that predominate in forgery studies, as well as the forgery of physical books, coins, and religious relics. The book examines the cultural, historical, and rhetorical functions of forgery that extend beyond the desire to deceive and profit. It analyses forgery in connection with related phenomena like pseudepigraphy, fakes, and copies; and it investigates the aesthetic and historical value that forgeries possess when scholarship takes seriously their form, content, and varied uses within and across cultures. Of particular interest is the way that forgeries embody a desire for the ancient and for the recovery of the fragmentary past of ancient Rome.

1 - 'Corinthian Bronzes': Miniature Masterpieces - Flagrant Forgeries
2 - Reading Against the Grain: Book Forgery and Book Labor at Rome
3 - Imperial Greek Atticism: A Culture of Forgery? Phrynicus and the Terminology of 'Authenticity'
4 - Forgery, Pseudepigrapha, and Other Typologies of Continuation in Latin Literature
5 - The Fluidity of False Coins
6 - Ancient Texts and Sibylline Truths: A Reflection on Forged Documentary Evidence and its Value in the Historia Augusta
7 - Thinking with Antiquity's Ancient Beginnings: The "First Pagan Historian" from Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson
8 - Forgery and the Desire for the Classical Author in the Pseudo-Ovidian De vetula
9 - Archaeology and the Invention of Holy Bodies in Post-Tridentine Rome
10 - Deceptively Authentic Additions
11 - Is Restoration Forgery?
12 - Fictional Forgeries and the Twilight of the Self: The Tablets of Armand Schwerner and Pascale Quignard

John Hopkins is Associate Professor of the art and archaeology of ancient Mediterranean peoples at New York University. He is author of The Genesis of Roman Architecture and Unbinding Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape, 700-200 BCE (2016). He is co-editor with Sarah Kielt Costello and Paul R. Davis of Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (2020). Scott McGill is Deedee McMurty Professor in the Humanities at Rice University. He is the author of four books, including most recently Virgil: Aeneid 11. A Commentary (2020), and the co-editor of three volumes. His translation, with Susannah Wright, of Virgil's Aeneid is forthcoming with Norton Press.